CurrencyCom Attacked Hours After Announcing Pullout From Russia

As one of the major crypto exchanges in Europe, CurrencyCom has a solid customer base in both Russia and Ukraine. On Saturday, the company confirmed that it had been attacked hours after announcing plans to halt onboarding new customers from Russia and reassured its customers that the attack was a failure.

The owner of CurrencyCom, originally from Belarus, attributed the successful defense to the company’s robust security measures and accused Russia of being responsible for the attack.

Cyberattack Against an Anti-Russia Exchange

CurrecyCom, a crypto exchange that had outspokenly condemned the war in Ukraine, confirmed that it was the target of “a failed distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyber-attack” on the 12th of April. No customer accounts or data were compromised since the company stated that its servers, including its backup servers, were not affected during the incident.

DDoS refers to a type of cyberattack initiated through millions of computers, bombarding a company’s website with numerous requests for crashing the system.

Last week, the London-based crypto exchange announced intentions to pull its business out of Russia, halting the opening of all new accounts and suspending operations for local residents. It came as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the retaliated backlash likely derived from Russia arrived only hours after the announcement.

Viktor Prokopenya, the founder of CurrencyCom, was convinced that Russia was responsible for the cyberattack, which intended to paralyze the exchange’s system, saying:

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist. We’ve been attacked before, like all financial firms, but the size of this was incredible: ten times anything we have ever seen.”

In addition, the company’s call-center staff received “a torrent of abuse and death threats” minutes after Prokopenya’s statement of suspending operations in Russia, a sign suggesting that the hackers behind the attack were indeed associated with Moscow.

Crypto Exchanges Insist Business-as-Usual

CurrencyCom’s tough stance against Russia earned support from the deputy digital minister of Ukraine, Alex Bornyakov, who welcomed the firm’s decision to exit entirely from the Russian market and encouraged other exchanges to follow its approach.

CurrencyCom’s exit announcement came after Binance said earlier it would not terminate its services to Russia-based clients for ensuring that “crypto is meant to provide greater financial freedom.”

The stance was in-line with other major exchanges like Kraken, whose CEO, Jesse Powell, believes it would be a mistake to stop people from accessing digital assets since they are the embodiment of libertarian value.